For the love of God is this,
that we keep his commandments.
To us this probably doesn't sound a lot like love, at least not immediately and at a glance. We were probably called to keep sundry commandments of various others during the course of our lives, whether of our parents, civil leaders, employers, or of others. But even the obedience due to our parents probably often felt more like obligation than like an act of love for them. What was asked of us may have been reasonable, at least if we planned to live in that house, that society, or work for that institution. But rather than seeming to be acts of love, our obedience probably often felt more like a trade, something we put up with for the sake of other benefits or privileges we received in return.
I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father (see John 14:31).
Jesus clearly experienced the keeping of the commandments in a different way than we usually do. He was not more acquiescing to them in order to gain something for himself. His motivation in obedience was entirely one of love. Jesus was able to love in this way because he was already secure in the love that the Father had for him. We too can come to have that relationship with the commandments if we first experience ourselves as loved by God.
Beloved, we love God because
he first loved us.
When we become convinced of God's love for us we want to love him in return. When we believe that we are loved to such a profound degree we lose our suspicion about the commandments, suspicion that they are meant to limit us, to repress us, or to hold us back.
For the love of God is this,
that we keep his commandments.
And his commandments are not burdensome,
for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.
The commandments, and walking in obedience generally, are necessary conditions of a life that we experience as victorious. The commandments definitely and emphatically do seem burdensome at a distance and from a merely human point of view. But when receive the call to keep them from a relationship of love, a relationship that God himself initiated, we do not experience them that way. They are instead revealed to be the keys by which we can live lives of joy, peace, and freedom.
This is the commandment we have from him:
Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
It turns out that the commandments only seem burdensome from a self-enclosed and egocentric point of view. To one degree or another we all have recalcitrant desires designed to keep us focused on our own health, wealth, and pleasure, to the exclusion of others, because from the point of view of our egos others are a threat. But a world of such isolated islands of selfishness, the longer it persists, the more fully it is realized, becomes more and more clearly revealed to be a hell on earth. It is only when we allow ourselves to become opened outward unto others that we experience anything like true fulfillment. Hence love of our sisters and brothers is vital. We can delude ourselves quite a bit about the degree of our imagined love for the God whom we have not seen. Love of sister and brother makes things too practical, concrete, and specific to ignore or deny.
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God,
and everyone who loves the Father
loves also the one begotten by him.
Jesus came to break open our love outward, like wheat that must first fall to the ground and die before it can bear fruit. By making us all, at least potentially, children of God, he has fully integrated the love we are meant to give to others with the love due to he himself. What is due to our neighbors is now not merely that which they have earned, but is instead meant to be the unmeasured abundant response to the love of God himself. It is precisely because this love issues from and is ordered toward God himself that all of the commandments begin to feel like victory.
And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.
Jesus returned from being tempted in the desert, where he was tempted to prefer himself to the will of his Father, entirely victorious, walking in the absolute freedom of perfect obedience. Hence it was only finally now, spoken by him, that the words of the prophet Isaiah were fulfilled:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
No one else before Jesus was sufficiently free to even want to fulfill those words entirely. We all had agendas other than the agenda of the Spirit. We were concerned only with achieving a year acceptable to ourselves rather than to the Lord But now Jesus had indeed come and loved perfectly, both his Father and we his children. We were now invited to respond by letting that same Spirit fill us as entirely as it did him, for we too, as Christians, are anointed for the same work.
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